but the greater part to the first twenty years of the present, gave a
polish and a grace to the lyric poetry of France which has rendered
his name celebrated in her criticism. The public taste of that country
is (or I should rather say, used to be) more intolerant of defects in
poetry than rigorous in its demands of excellence. Malherbe,
therefore, who substituted a regular and accurate versification, a
style pure and generally free from pedantic or colloquial phrases, and
a sustained tone of what were reckoned elevated thoughts, for the more
unequal strains of the sixteenth century, acquired a reputation which
may lead some of his readers to disappointment. And this is likely to
be increased by a very few lines of great beauty which are known by
heart. These stand too much alone in his poems. In general, we find in
them neither imagery nor sentiment that yield us delight. He is less
mythological, less affected, less given to frigid hyperboles than his
predecessors, but far too much so for anyone accustomed to real
poetry. In the panegyrical odes Malherbe displays some felicity and
skill; the poet of kings and courtiers, he wisely perhaps wrote, even
when he could have written better, what kings and courtiers would
understand and reward. Polished and elegant, his lines seldom pass the
conventional tone of poetry; and while he is never original, he is
rarely impressive. Malherbe may stand in relation to Horace as
Chiabrera does to Pindar: the analogy is not very close; but he is far
from deficient in that calm philosophy which forms the charm of the
Roman poet, and we are willing to believe that he sacrificed his time
reluctantly to the praises of the great. It may be suspected that he
wrote verses for others; a practice not unusual, I believe, among
these courtly rhymers; at least, his Alcandre seems to be Henry IV.,
Chrysanthe or Oranthe, the Princess of Condé. He seems himself, in
some passages, to have affected gallantry towards Mary of Medicis,
which at that time was not reckoned an impertinence. It is hardly
perhaps worth mentioning that Malherbe uses lines of an uneven number
of syllables; an innovation, as I believe it was, that has had no
success.
|Criticisms upon his poetry.|
21. Bouterwek has criticised Malherbe with some justice, but with
greater severity.[472] He deems him no poet, which in a certain sense
is surely true. But we narrow our definition of poetry too much, when
we exclude from it the versification of good sense and select diction.
This may probably be ascribed to Malherbe; though Bouhours, an acute
and somewhat rigid critic, has pointed out some passages which he
deems nonsensical. Another writer of the same age, Rapin, whose own
taste was not very glowing, observes that there is much prose in
Malherbe; and that, well as he merits to be called correct, he is a
little too desirous of appearing so, and often becomes frigid.[473]
Boileau has extolled him, perhaps, somewhat too highly, and La Harpe
is inclined to the same side; but in the modern state of French
criticism, the danger is that the Malherbes will be too much
depreciated.
[472] Vol. v., p. 238.
[473] Réflexions sur la Poétique, p. 147. Malherbe a esté le
premier qui nous a remis dans le bon chemin, joignant la purité
au grand style; mais comme il commença cette manière, il ne put
la porter jusques dans sa perfection; il y a bien de la prose
dans ses vers. In another place he says, Malherbe est exact et
correct; mais il ne hazarde rien, et par l’envie qu’il a d’être
trop sage, il est souvent froid, p. 209.
|Satires of Regnier.|
|Racan--Maynard.|
22. The satires of Regnier have been highly praised by Boileau, a
competent judge, no doubt, in such matters. Some have preferred
Regnier even to himself, and found in this old Juvenal of France a
certain stamp of satirical genius which the more polished critic
wanted.[474] These satires are unlike all other French poetry of the
age of Henry IV.; the tone is vehement, somewhat rugged and coarse,
and reminds us a little of his contemporaries Hall and Donne, whom,
however, he will generally and justly be thought much to excel. Some
of his satires are borrowed from Ovid or from the Italians.[475] They
have been called gross and licentious; but this only applies to one,
the rest are unexceptionable. Regnier, who had probably some quarrel
with Malherbe, speaks with contempt of his elaborate polish. But the
taste of France, and especially of that highly cultivated nobility who
formed the court of Louis XIII. and his son, no longer endured the
rude though sometimes animated versification of the older poets. Next
to Malherbe in reputation stood Racan and Maynard, both more or less
of his school. Of these it was said by their master that Racan wanted
the diligence of Maynard, as Maynard did the spirit of Racan, and that
a good poet might be made out of the two.[476] A foreigner will in
general prefer the former, who seems to have possessed more
imagination and sensibility, and a keener relish for rural beauty.
Maynard’s verses, according to Pelisson, have an ease and elegance
that few can imitate, which proceeds from his natural and simple
construction.[477] He had more success in epigram than in his sonnets,
which Boileau has treated with little respect. Nor does he speak
better of Malleville, who chose no other species of verse, but seldom
produced a finished piece, though not deficient in spirit and
delicacy. Viaud, more frequently known by the name of Theophile, a
writer of no great elevation of style, is not destitute of
imagination. Such at least is the opinion of Rapin and Bouterwek.[478]
[474] Bouterwek, p. 246. La Harpe. Biogr. Univ.
[475] Niceron, xi. 397.
[476] Pelisson, Hist. de l’Acadèmie, i. 260. Baillet, Jugemens
des Savans (Poetes), n. 1510. La Harpe Cours de Littérature.
Bouterwek, v. 260.
[477] Idem.
[478] Bouterwek, 252. Rapin says, Théophile a l’imagination
grande et le sens petit. Il a des hardiesses heureuses à force de
se permettre tout. Réflexions sur la Poétique, p. 209.
|Voiture.|
|Sarrazin.|
23. The poems of Gombauld were, in general, published before the
middle of the century; his epigrams, which are most esteemed, in 1657.
These are often lively and neat. But a style of playfulness and gaiety
had been introduced by Voiture. French poetry under Ronsard and his
school, and even that of Malherbe, had lost the lively tone of Marot,
and became serious almost to severity. Voiture, with an apparent ease
and grace, though without the natural air of the old writers, made it
once more amusing. In reality, the style of Voiture is artificial and
elaborate, but, like his imitator Prior among us, he has the skill to
disguise this from the reader. He must be admitted to have had, in
verse as well as prose, a considerable influence over the taste of
France. He wrote to please women, and women are grateful when
they are pleased. Sarrazin, says his biographer, though less
celebrated than Voiture, deserves perhaps to be rated above him; with
equal ingenuity, he is far more natural.[479] The German historian of
French literature has spoken less respectfully of Sarrazin, whose
verses are the most insipid rhymed prose, such as he not unhappily
calls toilet-poetry.[480] This is a style which finds little mercy on
the right bank of the Rhine; but the French are better judges of the
merit of Sarrazin.
[479] Biogr. Univ. Baillet, n. 1532.
[480] Bouterwek, v. 256. Specimens of all these poets will be
found in the collection of Auguis, vol. vi.: and I must own,
that, with the exceptions of Malherbe, Regnier, and one or two
more, my own acquaintance with them extends little farther.
SECT. IV.
_Rise of Poetry in Germany--Opitz and his followers--Dutch Poets._
|Low state of German literature.|
|Literary Societies.|
24. The German language had never been more despised by the learned
and the noble than at the beginning of the seventeenth century, which
seems to be the lowest point in its native literature. The capacity
was not wanting; many wrote Latin verse with success; the collection
made by Gruter is abundant in these cultivators of a foreign tongue,
several of whom belong to the close of the preceding age. But among
these it is said that whoever essayed to write their own language did
but fail, and the instances adduced are very few. The upper ranks
began about this time to speak French in common society; the burghers,
as usual, strove to imitate them, and what was far worse, it became
the mode to intermingle French words with German, not singly and
sparingly, as has happened in other times and countries, but in a
jargon affectedly pie-bald and macaronic. Some hope might have been
founded on the literary academies, which, in emulation of Italy,
sprung up in this period. The oldest is The Fruitful Society, (die
fruchtbringende Gesellschaft) known also as the order of Palms,
established at Weimar in 1617.[481] Five princes enrolled their names
at the beginning. It held forth the laudable purpose of purifying and
correcting the mother tongue and of promoting its literature, after
the manner of the Italian academies. But it is not unusual for
literary associations to promise much and fail of performance; one man
is more easily found to lay down a good plan, than many to co-operate
in its execution. Probably this was merely the scheme of some more
gifted individual, perhaps Werder, who translated Ariosto and
Tasso;[482] for little good was affected by the institution. Nor did
several others which at different times in the seventeenth century
arose over Germany, deserve more praise. They copied the academies of
Italy in their quaint names and titles, in their bye-laws, their petty
ceremonials and symbolic distinctions, to which, as we always find in
these self-elected societies, they attached vast importance, and
thought themselves superior to the world by doing nothing for it.
“They are gone,” exclaims Bouterwek, “and have left no clear vestige
of their existence.” Such had been the meister-singers before them,
and little else in effect were the Academies, in a more genial soil,
of their own age. Notwithstanding this, though I am compelled to
follow the historian of German literature, it must strike us that
these societies seem to manifest a public esteem for something
intellectual, which they knew not precisely how to attain; and it is
to be observed that several of the best poets in the seventeenth
century belonged to them.
[481] Bouterwek, x. 35.
[482] Id. p. 29.
|Opitz.|
25. A very small number of poets, such as Meckerlin and Spee, in the
early part of the seventeenth century, though with many faults in
point of taste, have been commemorated by the modern historians of
literature. But they were wholly eclipsed by one whom Germany regards
as the founder of her poetic literature, Martin Opitz, a native of
Silesia, honoured with a laurel crown by the emperor in 1628, and
raised to offices of distinction and trust in several courts. The
national admiration of Opitz seems to have been almost enthusiastic;
yet Opitz was far from being the poet of enthusiasm. Had he been such
his age might not have understood him. His taste was French and Dutch;
two countries of which the poetry was pure and correct but not
imaginative. No great elevation, no energy of genius will be found in
this German Heinsius and Malherbe. Opitz displayed, however, another
kind of excellence. He wrote the language with a purity of idiom, in
which Luther alone, whom he chose as his model, was superior; he gave
more strength to the versification, and paid a regard to the
collocation of syllables according to their quantity, or length of
time required for articulation, which the earlier poets had neglected.
He is therefore reckoned the inventor of a rich and harmonious rhythm;
and he also rendered the Alexandrine verse much more common than
before.[483] His verse is good; he writes as one conversant with the
ancients, and with mankind; if he is too didactic and learned for a
poet in the higher sense of the word, if his taste appears fettered by
the models he took for imitation, if he even retarded, of which we can
hardly be sure, the development of a more genuine nationality in
German literature, he must still be allowed, in a favourable sense, to
have made an epoch in its history.[484]
[483] Bouterwek (p. 94) thinks this no advantage; a rhymed prose
in Alexandrines overspread the German literature of the
seventeenth and first part of the eighteenth century.
[484] Bouterwek, x. 89-119, has given an elaborate critique of
the poetry of Opitz. “He is the father, not of German poetry, but
of the modern German language of poetry, der neueren deutschen
dichtersprache, p. 93. The fame of Opitz spread beyond his
country, little as his language was familiar. Non periit
Germania, Grotius writes to him, in 1631, Opiti doctissime, quæ
te habet locupletissimum testem, quid lingua Germanica, quid
ingenia Germanica valeant. Epist. 272. And afterwards, in 1638,
thanking him for the present of his translation of the Psalms;
Dignus erat rex poeta interprete Germanorum poetarum rege; nihil
enim tibi blandiens dico; ita sentio à te primum Germanicæ poesi
formam datam et habitum quo cum aliis gentibus possit contendere.
Ep. 999. Baillet observes, that Opitz passes for the best of
German poets, and the first who give rules to that poetry, and
raised it to the state it had since reached; so that he is rather
to be accounted its father than its improver. Jugemens des Savans
(Poëtes), n. 1436. But reputation is transitory; though ten
editions of the poems of Opitz were published within the
seventeenth century, which Bouterwek thinks much for Germany at
that time, though it would not be so much in some countries,
scarce anyone, except the lovers of old literature, now ask for
these obsolete productions, p. 90.
|His followers.|
26. Opitz is reckoned the founder of what was called the first
Silesian school, rather so denominated from him than as determining
the birthplace of its poets. They were chiefly lyric, but more in the
line of songs and short effusions in trochaic metre than of the
regular ode, and sometimes display much spirit and feeling. The German
song always seems to bear a resemblance to the English; the identity
of metre and rhythm conspires with what is more essential, a certain
analogy of sentiment. Many, however, of Opitz’s followers, like
himself, took Holland for their Parnassus, and translated their songs
from Dutch. Fleming was distinguished by a genuine feeling for lyric
poetry; he made Opitz his model, but had he not died young, would
probably have gone beyond him, being endowed by nature with a more
poetical genius. Gryph, or Gryphius, who belonged to the Fruitful
Society, and bore in that the surname of the immortal, with faults
that strike the reader in every page, is also superior in fancy and
warmth to Opitz. But Gryph is better known in German literature by his
tragedies. The hymns of the Lutheran church are by no means the lowest
form of German poetry. They have been the work of every age since the
reformation; but Dach and Gerhard, who, especially the latter,
excelled in these devotional songs, lived about the middle of the
seventeenth century. The shade of Luther seemed to protect the church
from the profanation of bad taste; or, as we should rather say, it was
the intense theopathy of the German nation, and the simple majesty of
their ecclesiastical music.[485]
[485] Bouterwek, x. 218. Eichhorn, iv. 888.
|Dutch poetry.|
27. It has been the misfortune of the Dutch, a great people, a people
fertile of men of various ability and erudition, a people of scholars,
of theologians and philosophers, of mathematicians, of historians, of
painters, and, we may add, of poets, that these last have been the
mere violets of the shade, and have peculiarly suffered by the narrow
limits within which their language has been spoken or known. The
Flemish dialect of the southern Netherlands might have contributed to
make up something like a national literature, extensive enough to be
respected in Europe, if those provinces, which now affect the somewhat
ridiculous name of Belgium, had been equally fertile of talents with
their neighbours.
|Spiegel.|
28. The golden age of Dutch literature is this first part of the
seventeenth century. Their chief poets are Spiegel, Hooft, Cats, and
Vondel. The first, who has been styled the Dutch Ennius, died in 1612:
his principal poem, of an ethical kind, is posthumous, but may
probably have been written towards the close of the preceding century.
“The style is vigorous and concise; it is rich in imagery and
powerfully expressed, but is deficient in elegance and perspicuity.”[486]
Spiegel had rendered much service to his native tongue, and was a
member of a literary academy which published a Dutch grammar in 1584.
Coornhert and Dousa, with others known to fame, were his colleagues;
and be it remembered, to the honour of Holland, that in Germany or
England, or even in France, there was as yet no institution of this
kind. But as Holland at the end of the sixteenth century, and for many
years afterwards, was pre-eminently the literary country of Europe, it
is not surprising that some endeavours were made, though unsuccessfully
as to European renown, to cultivate the native language. This language
is also more soft, though less sonorous than the German.
[486] Biogr. Univ.
|Hooft. Cats. Vondel.|
29. Spiegel was followed by a more celebrated poet, Peter Hooft, who
gave sweetness and harmony to Dutch verse. “The great creative power
of poetry,” it has been said, “he did not possess; but his language is
correct, his style agreeable, and he did much to introduce a better
epoch.”[487] His amatory and Anacreontic lines have never been
excelled in the language; and Hooft is also distinguished both as a
dramatist and an historian. He has been called the Tacitus of Holland.
But here again his praises must by the generality be taken upon trust.
Cats is a poet of a different class; ease, abundance, simplicity,
clearness, and purity are the qualities of his style: his imagination
is gay, his morality popular and useful. No one was more read than
Father Cats, as the people call him; but he is often trifling and
monotonous. Cats, though he wrote for the multitude, whose descendants
still almost know his poems by heart, was a man whom the republic held
in high esteem; twice ambassador in England, he died great pensionary
of Holland, in 1651. Vondel, a native of Cologne, but the glory, as he
is deemed, of Dutch poetry, was best known as a tragedian. In his
tragedies, the lyric part, the choruses which he retained after the
ancient model, have been called the sublimest of odes. But some have
spoken less highly of Vondel.[488]
[487] Biogr. Univ.
[488] Foreign Quart. Rev., vol. iv., p. 49. For this short
account of the Dutch poets I am indebted to Eichhorn, vol. iv.,
part 1, and to the Biographie Universelle.
|Danish poetry.|
30. Denmark had no literature in the native language, except a
collection of old ballads, full of Scandinavian legends, till the
present period; and in this it does not appear that she had more than
one poet, a Norwegian bishop, named Arrebo. Nothing, I believe, was
written in Swedish. Sclavonian writers there were; but we know so
little of those languages, that they cannot enter, at least during so
distant a period, into the history of European literature.
SECT. V.
ON ENGLISH POETRY.
_Imitators of Spenser--The Fletchers--Philosophical Poets--Denham--
Donne--Cowley--Historical and Narrative Poets--Shakspeare’s
Sonnets--Lyric Poets--Milton’s Lycidas, and other Poems._
|English poets numerous in this age.|
31. The English poets of these fifty years are very numerous, and
though the greater part are not familiar to the general reader, they
form a favourite study of those who cultivate our poetry, and are
sought by all collectors of scarce and interesting literature. Many of
them have within half a century been reprinted separately, and many
more in the useful and copious collections of Anderson, Chalmers, and
other editors. Extracts have also been made by Headley, Ellis,
Campbell, and Southey. It will be convenient to arrange them rather
according to the schools to which they belonged, than in mere order of
chronology.
|Phineas Fletcher.|
32. Whatever were the misfortunes of Spenser’s life, whatever neglect
he might have experienced at the hands of a statesman grown old in
cares, which render a man insensible to song, his spirit might be
consoled by the prodigious reputation of the Faëry Queen. He was
placed at once by his country above all the great Italian names, and
next to Virgil among the ancients; it was a natural consequence that
some should imitate what they so deeply reverenced. An ardent
admiration for Spenser inspired the genius of two young brothers,
Phineas and Giles Fletcher. The first, very soon after the Queen’s
death, as some allusions to Lord Essex seem to denote, composed,
though he did not so soon publish, a poem, entitled The Purple Island.
By this strange name he expressed a subject more strange; it is a
minute and elaborate account of the body and mind of man. Through five
cantos the reader is regaled with nothing but allegorical anatomy, in
the details of which Phineas seems tolerably skilled, evincing a great
deal of ingenuity in diversifying his metaphors, and in presenting the
delineation of his imaginary island with as much justice as
possible to the allegory, without obtruding it on the reader’s view.
In the sixth canto he rises to the intellectual and moral faculties of
the soul, which occupy the rest of the poem. From its nature it is
insuperably wearisome; yet his language is often very poetical, his
versification harmonious, his invention fertile. But that perpetual
monotony of allegorical persons, which sometimes displeases us even in
Spenser, is seldom relieved in Fletcher; the understanding revolts at
the confused crowd of inconceivable beings in a philosophical poem;
and the justness of analogy, which had given us some pleasure in the
anatomical cantos, is lost in tedious descriptions of all possible
moral qualities, each of them personified, which can never coexist in
the Purple Island of one individual.
|Giles Fletcher.|
33. Giles Fletcher, brother of Phineas, in Christ’s Victory and
Triumph, though his subject has not all the unity that might be
desired, had a manifest superiority in its choice. Each uses a stanza
of his own; Phineas one of seven lines, Giles one of eight. This poem
was published in 1610. Each brother alludes to the work of the other,
which must be owing to the alterations made by Phineas in his Purple
Island, written probably the first, but not published, I believe, till
1633. Giles seems to have more vigour than his elder brother; but less
sweetness, less smoothness, and more affectation in his style. This,
indeed, is deformed by words neither English nor Latin, but simply
barbarous; such as _elamping_, _eblazon_, _deprostrate_, _purpured_,
_glitterand_, and many others. They both bear much resemblance to
Spenser: Giles sometimes ventures to cope with him, even in celebrated
passages, such as the description of the Cave of Despair.[489] And he
has had the honour, in turn, of being followed by Milton, especially
in the first meeting of our Saviour with Satan in the Paradise
Regained. Both of these brothers are deserving of much praise; they
were endowed with minds eminently poetical, and not inferior in
imagination to any of their contemporaries. But an injudicious taste,
and an excessive fondness for a style which the public was rapidly
abandoning, that of allegorical personification, prevented their
powers from being effectively displayed.
[489] Christ’s Vict. and Triumph, ii. 23.
|Philosophical poetry.|
34. Notwithstanding the popularity of Spenser, and the general pride
in his name, that allegorical and imaginative school of poetry, of
which he was the greatest ornament, did not by any means exclude a
very different kind. The English, or such as by their education gave
the tone in literature, had become, in the latter years of the Queen,
and still more under her successor, a deeply thinking, a learned, a
philosophical people. A sententious reasoning, grave, subtle, and
condensed, or the novel and remote analogies of wit, gained praise
from many whom the creations of an excursive fancy could not attract.
Hence, much of the poetry of James’s reign is distinguished from that
of Elizabeth, except, perhaps, her last years, by partaking of the
general character of the age; deficient in simplicity, grace, and
feeling, often obscure and pedantic, but impressing us with a respect
for the man, where we do not recognise the poet. From this condition
of public taste arose two schools of poetry, different in character,
if not unequal in merit, but both appealing to the reasoning more than
to the imaginative faculty as their judge.
|Lord Brooke.|
35. The first of these may own as its founder, Sir John Davis, whose
poem on the Immortality of the Soul, published in 1600, has had its
due honour in our last volume. Davies is eminent for perspicuity; but
this cannot be said for another philosophical poet, Sir Fulk Greville,
afterwards Lord Brooke, the bosom friend of Sir Philip Sydney, and
once the patron of Jordano Bruno. The titles of Lord Brooke’s poems, A
Treatise of Human Learning, A Treatise of Monarchy, A Treatise of
Religion, An Inquisition upon Fame and Honour, lead us to anticipate
more of sense than fancy. In this we are not deceived; his mind was
pregnant with deep reflection upon multifarious learning, but he
struggles to give utterance to thoughts which he had not fully endowed
with words, and amidst the shackles of rhyme and metre which he had
not learned to manage. Hence, of all our poets he may be reckoned the
most obscure; in aiming at condensation, he becomes elliptical beyond
the bounds of the language, and his rhymes, being forced for the sake
of sound, leave all meaning behind. Lord Brooke’s poetry is chiefly
worth notice as an indication of that thinking spirit upon political
science, which was to produce the riper speculations of Hobbes, and
Harrington, and Locke.
|Denham’s Cooper’s Hill.|
36. This argumentative school of verse was so much in unison with the
character of that generation, that Daniel, a poet of a very
different temper, adopted it in his panegyric addressed to James soon
after his accession, and in some other poems. It had an influence upon
others who trod generally in a different track, as is especially
perceived in Giles Fletcher. The Cooper’s Hill of Sir John Denham,
published in 1643, belongs in a considerable degree to this reasoning
class of poems. It is also descriptive, but the description is made to
slide into philosophy. The plan is original, as far as our poetry is
concerned, and I do not recollect any exception in other languages.
Placing himself upon an eminence not distant from Windsor, he takes a
survey of the scene; he finds the tower of St. Paul’s on his farthest
horizon, the Castle much nearer, and the Thames at his feet. These,
with the ruins of an abbey, supply in turn materials for a reflecting
rather than imaginative mind, and, with a stag hunt which he has very
well described, fill up the canvas of a poem of no great length, but
once of no trifling reputation.
37. The epithet, _majestic_ Denham, conferred by Pope, conveys
rather too much; but Cooper’s Hill is no ordinary poem. It is nearly
the first instance of vigorous and rhythmical couplets, for Denham is
incomparably less feeble than Browne, and less prosaic than Beaumont.
Close in thought, and nervous in language like Davies, he is less hard
and less monotonous; his cadences are animated and various, perhaps a
little beyond the regularity that metre demands; they have been the
guide to the finer ear of Dryden. Those who cannot endure the
philosophic poetry, must ever be dissatisfied with Cooper’s Hill; no
personification, no ardent words, few metaphors beyond the common use
of speech, nothing that warms, or melts, or fascinates the heart. It
is rare to find lines of eminent beauty in Denham; and equally so to
be struck by anyone as feeble or low. His language is always well
chosen and perspicuous, free from those strange turns of expression,
frequent in our older poets, where the reader is apt to suspect some
error of the press, so irreconcilable do they seem with grammar or
meaning. The expletive _do_, which the best of his predecessors
use freely, seldom occurs in Denham; and he has in other respects
brushed away the rust of languid and ineffective redundancies which
have obstructed the popularity of men with more native genius than
himself.[490]
[490] The comparison by Denham between the Thames and
his own poetry was one celebrated:--
O could I flow like thee, and make thy stream
My bright example, as it is my theme:
Though deep, yet clear; though gentle, yet not dull;
Strong without rage, without o’erflowing full.
Johnson, while he highly extols these lines, truly observes, that
“most of the words thus artfully opposed, are to be understood
simply on one side of the comparison, and metaphorically on the
other; and if there be any language which does not express
intellectual operations by material images, into that language
they cannot be translated.” Perhaps these metaphors are so
naturally applied to style, that no language of a cultivated
people is without them. But the ground of objection is, in fact,
that the lines contain nothing but wit, and that wit which turns
on a play of words. They are rather ingenious in this respect,
and remarkably harmonious, which is probably the secret of their
popularity; but, as poetry, they deserve no great praise.
|Poets called metaphysical.|
38. Another class of poets in the reigns of James and his son were
those whom Johnson has called the metaphysical; a name rather more
applicable, in the ordinary use of the word, to Davies and Brooke.
These were such as laboured after conceits, or novel turns of thought,
usually false, and resting upon some equivocation of language, or
exceedingly remote analogy. This style Johnson supposes to have been
derived from Marini. But Donne, its founder, as Johnson imagines, in
England, wrote before Marini. It is in fact, as we have lately
observed, the style which, though Marini has earned the discreditable
reputation of perverting the taste of his country by it, had been
gaining ground through the latter half of the sixteenth century. It
was, in a more comprehensive view, one modification of that vitiated
taste which sacrificed all ease and naturalness of writing and
speaking for the sake of display. The mythological erudition and
Grecisms of Ronsard’s school, the Euphuism of that of Lilly, the
“estilo culto” of Gongora, even the pedantic quotations of Burton and
many similar writers, both in England and on the continent, sprang
like the concetti of the Italians, and of their English imitators,
from the same source, a dread of being overlooked if they paced on
like their neighbours. And when a few writers had set the example of
successful faults, a bad style, where no sound principles of criticism
had been established, readily gaining ground, it became necessary that
those who had not vigour enough to rise above the fashion, should seek
to fall in with it. Nothing is more injurious to the cultivation of
verse, than the trick of desiring, for praise or profit, to attract
those by poetry whom nature has left destitute of every quality which
genuine poetry can attract. The best, and perhaps the only secure
basis for _public_ taste, for an æsthetic appreciation of beauty, in a
court, a college, a city, is so general a diffusion of classical
knowledge, as by rendering the finest models familiar, and by giving
them a sort of authority, will discountenance and check at the outset
the vicious novelties which always exert some influence over
uneducated minds. But this was not yet the case in England. Milton was
perhaps the first writer who eminently possessed a genuine discernment
and feeling of antiquity; though it may be perceived in Spenser, and
also in a very few who wrote in prose.
|Donne.|
39. Donne is generally esteemed the earliest, as Cowley was afterwards
the most conspicuous model of this manner. Many instances of it,
however, occur in the lighter poetry of the Queen’s reign. Donne is
the most inharmonious of our versifiers, if he can be said to have
deserved such a name by lines too rugged to seem metre. Of his earlier
poems many are very licentious; the later are chiefly devout. Few are
good for much; the conceits have not even the merit of being
intelligible; it would perhaps be difficult to select three passages
that we should care to read again.
|Crashaw.|
40. The second of these poets was Crashaw, a man of some imagination
and great piety, but whose softness of heart, united with feeble
judgment, led him to admire and imitate whatever was most extravagant
in the mystic writings of Saint Teresa. He was more than Donne a
follower of Marini, one of whose poems, The Massacre of the Innocents,
he translated with success. It is difficult, in general, to find
anything in Crashaw that bad taste has not deformed. His poems were
first published in 1646.
|Cowley.|
41. In the next year, 1647, Cowley’s Mistress appeared; the most
celebrated performance of the miscalled metaphysical poets. It is a
series of short amatory poems, in the Italian style of the age, full
of analogies that have no semblance of truth, except from the double
sense of words, and thoughts that unite the coldness of subtlety with
the hyperbolical extravagance of counterfeited passion. The
Anacreontic lines, and some other light pieces of Cowley, have a
spirit and raciness very unlike these frigid conceits; and in the ode
on the death of his friend Mr. Harvey, he gave some proofs of real
sensibility and poetic grace. The Pindaric odes of Cowley were not
published within this period. But it is not worth while to defer
mention of them. They contain, like all his poetry, from time to time,
very beautiful lines, but the faults are still of the same kind; his
sensibility and good sense, nor has any poet more, are choked by false
taste; and it would be difficult to fix on any one poem in which the
beauties are more frequent than the blemishes. Johnson has selected
the elegy on Crashaw as the finest of Cowley’s works. It begins with a
very beautiful couplet, but I confess that little else seems, to my
taste, of much value. The Complaint, probably better known than any
other poem, appears to me the best in itself. His disappointed hopes
give a not unpleasing melancholy to several passages. But his Latin
ode in a similar strain is much more perfect. Cowley, perhaps, upon
the whole has had a reputation more above his deserts than any English
poet; yet it is very easy to perceive that some who wrote better than
he, did not possess so fine a genius. Johnson has written the life of
Cowley with peculiar care; and as his summary of the poet’s character
is more favourable than my own, it may be candid to insert it in this
place, as at least very discriminating, elaborate, and well expressed.
|Johnson’s character of him.|
42. “It may be affirmed, without any encomiastic fervour, that he
brought to his poetic labours a mind replete with learning, and that
his pages are embellished with all the ornaments which books could
supply; that he was the first who imparted to English numbers the
enthusiasm of the greater ode, and the gaiety of the less;[491] that
he was equally qualified for sprightly sallies and for lofty flights;
that he was among those who freed translation from servility, and
instead of following his author at a distance, walked by his side; and
that, if he left versification yet improvable, he left likewise from
time to time such specimens of excellence as enabled succeeding poets
to improve it.”
[491] Was not Milton’s Ode on the Nativity written as early as
any of Cowley’s? And would Johnson have thought Cowley superior
in gaiety to Sir John Suckling?
|Narrative poets. Daniel.|
43. The poets of historical or fabulous narrative belong to another
class. Of these the earliest is Daniel, whose minor poems fall partly
within the sixteenth century. His History of the Civil Wars between
York and Lancaster, a poem in eight books, was published in 1604.
Faithfully adhering to truth, which he does not suffer so much as an
ornamental episode to interrupt, and equally studious to avoid the
bolder figures of poetry, it is not surprising that Daniel should be
little read. It is indeed certain that much Italian and Spanish
poetry, even by those whose name has once stood rather high, depends
chiefly upon merits which he abundantly possesses, a smoothness of
rhythm, and a lucid narration in simple language. But that which from
the natural delight in sweet sound is enough to content the ear in the
southern tongues, will always seem bald and tame in our less
harmonious verse. It is the chief praise of Daniel, and must have
contributed to what popularity he enjoyed in his own age, that his
English is eminently pure, free from affectation of archaism and from
pedantic innovation, with very little that is now obsolete. Both in
prose and in poetry, he is, as to language, among the best writers of
his time, and wanted but a greater confidence in his own power, or, to
speak less indulgently, a greater share of it, to sustain his correct
taste, calm sense, and moral feeling.
|Drayton’s Polyolbion.|
44. Next to Daniel in time, and much above him in reach of mind, we
place Michael Drayton, whose Baron’s Wars have been mentioned under
the preceding period, but whose more famous work was published partly
in 1613 and partly in 1622. Drayton’s Polyolbion is a poem of about
30,000 lines in length, written in Alexandrine couplets, a measure,
from its monotony, and perhaps from its frequency in doggerel ballads,
not at all pleasing to the ear. It contains a topographical
description of England, illustrated with a prodigality of historical
and legendary erudition. Such a poem is essentially designed to
instruct, and speaks to the understanding more than to the fancy. The
powers displayed in it are, however, of a high cast. It has generally
been a difficulty with poets to deal with a necessary enumeration of
proper names. The catalogue of ships is not the most delightful part
of the Iliad, and Ariosto never encounters such a roll of persons or
places without sinking into the tamest insipidity. Virgil is
splendidly beautiful upon similar occasions; but his decorative
elegance could not be preserved, nor would continue to please in a
poem that kept up through a great length the effort to furnish
instruction. The style of Drayton is sustained, with extraordinary
ability, on an equable line, from which he seldom much deviates,
neither brilliant nor prosaic; few or no passages could be marked as
impressive, but few are languid or mean. The language is clear,
strong, various, and sufficiently figurative; the stories and fictions
interspersed, as well as the general spirit and liveliness, relieve
the heaviness incident to topographical description. There is probably
no poem of this kind in any other language, comparable together in
extent and excellence to the Polyolbion; nor can any one read a
portion of it without admiration for its learned and highly gifted
author. Yet, perhaps, no English poem, known as well by name, is so
little known beyond its name; for while its immense length deters the
common reader, it affords, as has just been hinted, no great harvest
for selection, and would be judged very unfairly by partial extracts.
It must be owned also that geography and antiquities may, in modern
times, be taught better in prose than in verse; yet, whoever consults
the Polyolbion for such objects, will probably be repaid by petty
knowledge which he may not have found anywhere else.
|Browne’s Britannia’s Pastorals.|
45. Among these historical poets I should incline to class William
Browne, author of a poem with the quaint title of Britannia’s
Pastorals, though his story, one of little interest, seems to have
been invented by himself. Browne indeed is of no distinct school among
the writers of that age; he seems to recognise Spenser as his master,
but his own manner is more to be traced among later than earlier
poets. He was a native of Devonshire; and his principal poem,
above-mentioned, relating partly to the local scenery of that county,
was printed in 1613. Browne is truly a poet full of imagination,
grace, and sweetness, though not very nervous or rapid. I know not why
Headley, favourable enough for the most part to this generation of the
sons of song, has spoken of Browne with unfair contempt. Justice,
however, has been done to him by later critics.[492] But I
have not observed that they take notice of what is remarkable in the
history of our poetical literature, that Browne is an early model of
ease and variety in the regular couplet. Many passages in his unequal
poem are hardly excelled by the fables of Dryden. It is manifest that
Milton was well acquainted with the writings of Browne.
[492] “Browne,” Mr. Southey says, “is a poet who produced no
slight effect upon his contemporaries. George Wither in his
happiest pieces has learned the manner of his friend, and Milton
may be traced to him. And in our days his peculiarities have been
caught, and his beauties imitated, by men who will themselves
find admirers and imitators hereafter.” “His poetry,” Mr.
Campbell, a far less indulgent judge of the older bards,
observes, “is not without beauty; but it is the beauty of mere
landscape and allegory, without the manners and passions that
constitute human interest.” Specimens of English Poetry, iv. 323.
|Sir John Beaumont.|
46. The commendation of improving the rhythm of the couplet is due
also to Sir John Beaumont, author of a short poem on the battle of
Bosworth Field. It was not written, however, so early as the
Britannia’s Pastorals of Browne. In other respects it has no
pretensions to a high rank. But it may be added that a poem of
Drummond on the visit of James I. to Scotland, in 1617, is perfectly
harmonious; and what is very remarkable in that age, he concludes the
verse at every couplet with the regularity of Pope.
|Davenant’s Gondibert.|
47. Far unlike the poem of Browne was Gondibert, published by Sir
William Davenant in 1650. It may probably have been reckoned by
himself an epic: but in that age the practice of Spain and Italy had
effaced the distinction between the regular epic and the heroic
romance. Gondibert belongs rather to the latter class by the entire
want of truth in the story, though the scene is laid at the court of
the Lombard kings, by the deficiency of unity in the action, by the
intricacy of the events, and by the resources of the fable, which are
sometimes too much in the style of comic fiction. It is so imperfect,
only two books and part of the third being completed, that we can
hardly judge of the termination it was to receive. Each book, however,
after the manner of Spenser, is divided into several cantos. It
contains about 6,000 lines. The metre is the four-lined stanza of
alternate rhymes; one capable of great vigour, but not perhaps well
adapted to poetry of imagination or of passion. These, however,
Davenant exhibits but sparingly in Gondibert; they are replaced by a
philosophical spirit, in the tone of Sir John Davies, who had adopted
the same metre, and, as some have thought, nourished by the author’s
friendly intercourse with Hobbes. Gondibert is written in a clear,
nervous, English style; its condensation produces some obscurity, but
pedantry, at least that of language, will rarely be found in it, and
Davenant is less infected by the love of conceit and of extravagance
than his contemporaries, though I would not assert that he is wholly
exempt from the former blemish. But the chief praise of Gondibert is
for masculine verse in a good metrical cadence; for the sake of which
we may forgive the absence of interest in the story, and even of those
glowing words and breathing thoughts which are the soul of genuine
poetry. Gondibert is very little read; yet it is better worth reading
than the Purple Island, though it may have less of that which
distinguishes a poet from another man.
|Sonnets of Shakspeare.|
48. The sonnets of Shakspeare, for we now come to the minor, that is,
the shorter and more lyric, poetry of the age, were published in 1609,
in a manner as mysterious as their subject and contents. They are
dedicated by an editor (Thomas Thorpe, a bookseller) “to Mr. W. H.,
the only begetter of these sonnets.”[493] No one, as far as I
remember, has ever doubted their genuineness; no one can doubt that
they express not only real but intense emotions of the heart; but when
they were written, who was the W. H., quaintly called their begetter,
by which we can only understand the cause of their being written, and
to what persons or circumstances they allude, has of late years been
the subject of much curiosity. These sonnets were long overlooked;
Steevens spoke of them with the utmost scorn, as productions which no
one could read; but a very different suffrage is generally given by
the lovers of poetry, and perhaps there is now a tendency, especially
among young men of poetical tempers, to exaggerate the beauties of
these remarkable productions. They rise, indeed, in estimation as we
attentively read and reflect upon them; for I do not think that at
first they give us much pleasure. No one ever entered more fully than
Shakspeare into the character of this species of poetry, which
admits of no expletive imagery, no merely ornamental line. But though
each sonnet has generally its proper unity, the sense, I do not mean
the grammatical construction, will sometimes be found to spread from
one to another, independently of that repetition of the leading idea,
like variations of an air, which a series of them frequently exhibits,
and on account of which they have latterly been reckoned by some
rather an integral poem than a collection of sonnets. But this is not
uncommon among the Italians, and belongs in fact to those of Petrarch
himself. They may easily be resolved into several series according to
their subjects;[494] but when read attentively, we find them relate to
one definite, though obscure, period of the poet’s life; in which an
attachment to some female, which seems to have touched neither his
heart nor his fancy very sensibly, was overpowered, without entirely
ceasing, by one to a friend; and this last is of such an enthusiastic
character, and so extravagant in the phrases that the author uses, as
to have thrown an unaccountable mystery over the whole work. It is
true that in the poetry as well as in the fictions of early ages, we
find a more ardent tone of affection in the language of friendship
than has since been usual; and yet no instance has been adduced of
such rapturous devotedness, such an idolatry of admiring love, as the
greatest being whom nature ever produced in the human form, pours
forth to some unknown youth in the majority of these sonnets.
[493] The precise words of the dedication are the following:
To the only Begetter
Of these ensuing sonnets
Mr. W. H.
All Happiness
And that eternity promised
By our ever living poet
Wisheth the
Well-wishing Adventurer
In setting forth
T. T.
The title page runs: Shakspeare’s Sonnets, never before
imprinted, 4to, 1609. G. Eld for T. T.
[494] This has been done in a late publication, “Shakspeare’s
Autobiographical poems, by George Armitage Brown” (1838). It
might have occurred to any attentive reader, but I do not know
that the analysis was ever so completely made before, though
almost every one has been aware that different persons are
addressed in the former and latter part of the sonnets. Mr.
Brown’s work did not fall into my hands till nearly the time that
these sheets passed through the press, which I mention on account
of some coincidences of opinion, especially as to Shakspeare’s
knowledge of Latin.
|The person whom they address.|
49. The notion that a woman was their general object is totally
untenable, and it is strange that Coleridge should have entertained
it.[495] Those that were evidently addressed to a woman, the person
above hinted, are by much the smaller part of the whole, but
twenty-eight out of one hundred and fifty-four. And this mysterious
Mr. W. H. must be presumed to be the idolised friend of Shakspeare.
But who could he be? No one recorded in literary history or anecdote
answers the description. But if we seize a clue which innumerable
passages give us, and suppose that they allude to a youth of high rank
as well as personal beauty and accomplishment, in whose favour and
intimacy, according to the base prejudices of the world, a player and
a poet, though he were the author of Macbeth, might be thought
honoured, something of the strangeness, as it appears to us, of
Shakspeare’s humiliation in addressing him as a being before whose
feet he crouched, whose frown he feared, whose injuries, and those of
the most insulting kind, the seduction of the mistress to whom we have
alluded, he felt and bewailed without resenting; something, I say, of
the strangeness of this humiliation, and at best it is but little, may
be lightened and in a certain sense rendered intelligible. And it has
been ingeniously conjectured within a few years by inquirers
independent of each other, that William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke,
born in 1580, and afterwards a man of noble and gallant character,
though always of a licentious life, was shadowed under the initials of
Mr. W. H. This hypothesis is not strictly proved, but sufficiently so,
in my opinion, to demand our assent.[496]
[495] “It seems to me that the sonnets could only have come from
a man deeply in love, and in love with a woman; and there is one
sonnet which, from its incongruity, I take to be a purposed
blind.” Table Talk, vol. ii., p. 180. This sonnet the editor
supposes to be the twentieth, which certainly could not have been
addressed to a woman; but the proof is equally strong as to most
of the rest. Coleridge’s opinion is absolutely untenable; nor do
I conceive that any one else is likely to maintain it after
reading the sonnets of Shakspeare; but to those who have not done
this the authority may justly seem imposing.
[496] In the Gentleman’s Magazine for 1832, p. 217, et post, it
will be seen that this occurred both to Mr. Boaden and Mr.
Heywood Bright. And it does not appear that Mr. Brown, author of
the work above-quoted, had any knowledge of their priority.
Drake has fixed on Lord Southampton as the object of these
sonnets, induced probably by the tradition of his friendship with
Shakspeare, and by the latter’s having dedicated to him his Venus
and Adonis, as well as by what is remarkable on the face of the
series of sonnets, that Shakspeare looked up to his friend “with
reverence and homage.” But, unfortunately, this was only the
reverence and homage of an inferior to one of high rank, and not
such as the virtues of Southampton might have challenged. Proofs
of the low moral character of “Mr. W. H.” are continual. It was
also impossible that Lord Southampton could be called “beauteous
and lovely youth,” or “sweet boy.” Mrs. Jameson, in her “Loves of
the Poets,” has adopted the same hypothesis, but is forced in
consequence to suppose some of the earlier sonnets to be
addressed to a woman.
Pembroke succeeded to his father in 1601: I incline to think that
the sonnets were written about that time, some probably earlier,
some later. That they were the same as Meres, in 1598, has
mentioned among the compositions of Shakspeare, his “sugred
sonnets among his private friends,” I do not believe, both on
account of the date, and from the peculiarly personal allusions
they contain.
50. Notwithstanding the frequent beauties of these sonnets,
the pleasure of their perusal is greatly diminished by these
circumstances; and it is impossible not to wish that Shakspeare had
never written them. There is a weakness and folly in all excessive and
misplaced affection, which is not redeemed by the touches of nobler
sentiments that abound in this long series of sonnets. But there are
also faults of a merely critical nature. The obscurity is often such
as only conjecture can penetrate; the strain of tenderness and
adoration would be too monotonous, were it less unpleasing; and so
many frigid conceits are scattered around, that we might almost fancy
the poet to have written without genuine emotion, did not such a host
of other passages attest the contrary.
|Sonnets of Drummond and others.|
51. The sonnets of Drummond, of Hawthornden, the most celebrated in
that class of poets, have obtained, probably, as much praise as they
deserve.[497] But they are polished and elegant, free from conceit and
bad taste, in pure, unblemished English; some are pathetic or tender
in sentiment, and if they do not show much originality, at least would
have acquired a fair place among the Italians of the sixteenth
century. Those of Daniel, of Drayton, and of Sir William Alexander,
afterwards Earl of Stirling, are perhaps hardly inferior. Some may
doubt, however, whether the last poet should be placed on such a
level.[498] But the difficulty of finding the necessary rhymes in our
language has caused most who have attempted the sonnet to swerve from
laws which cannot be transgressed, at least to the degree they have
often dared, without losing the unity for which that complex mechanism
was contrived. Certainly, three quatrains of alternate rhymes,
succeeded by a couplet, which Drummond, like many other English poets,
has sometimes given us, is the very worst form of the sonnet, even if,
in deference to a scanty number of Italian precedents, we allow it to
pass as a sonnet at all.[499] We possess, indeed, noble poetry in the
form of sonnet; yet with us it seems more fitted for grave than
amatory composition; in the latter we miss the facility and grace of
our native English measures, the song, the madrigal, or the ballad.
[497] I concur in this with Mr. Campbell, iv., 343. Mr. Southey
thinks Drummond “has deserved the high reputation he has
obtained;” which seems to say the same thing, but is, in fact,
different. He observes that Drummond “frequently borrows and
sometimes translates from the Italian and Spanish poets.”
Southey’s British Poets, p. 798. The furious invective of Gifford
against Drummond, for having written private memoranda of his
conversations with Ben Jonson, which he did not publish, and
which, for aught we know, were perfectly faithful, is absurd.
Anyone else would have been thankful for so much literary
anecdote.
[498] Lord Stirling is rather monotonous, as sonnetteers usually
are, and he addresses his mistress by the appellation, “Fair
tygress.” Campbell observes that there is elegance of expression
in a few of Stirling’s shorter pieces. Vol. iv., p. 206. The
longest poem of Stirling is entitled Domesday, in twelve books,
or, as he calls them, hours. It is written in the Italian octave
stanza, and has somewhat of the condensed style of the
philosophical school, which he seems to have imitated, but his
numbers are harsh.
[499] The legitimate sonnet consists of two quatrains and two
tercets; as much skill, to say the least, is required for the
management of the latter as of the former. The rhymes of the last
six lines are capable of many arrangements; but by far the worst,
and also the least common in Italy, is that we usually adopt, the
fifth and sixth rhyming together, frequently after a full pause,
so that the sonnet ends with the point of an epigram. The best
form, as the Italians hold, is the rhyming together of the three
uneven, and the three even lines; but as our language is less
rich in consonant terminations, there can be no objection to what
has abundant precedents even in theirs, the rhyming of the first
and fourth, second and fifth, third and sixth lines. This, with a
break in the sense at the third line, will make a real sonnet,
which Shakspeare, Milton, Bowles, and Wordsworth have often
failed to give us, even where they have given us something good
instead.
|Carew.|
52. Carew is the most celebrated among the lighter poets, though no
collection has hitherto embraced his entire writings. Headley has
said, and Ellis echoes the praise, that “Carew has the ease without
the pedantry of Waller, and perhaps less conceit. Waller is too
exclusively considered as the first man who brought versification to
anything like its present standard. Carew’s pretensions to the same
merit are seldom sufficiently either considered or allowed.” Yet, in
point of versification, others of the same age seem to have surpassed
Carew, whose lines are often very harmonious, but not so artfully
constructed or so uniformly pleasing as those of Waller. He is
remarkably unequal; the best of his little poems (none of more than
thirty lines are good), excel all of his time; but, after a few lines
of great beauty, we often come to some ill-expressed or obscure, or
weak, or inharmonious passage. Few will hesitate to acknowledge that
he has more fancy and more tenderness than Waller, but less choice,
less judgment and knowledge where to stop, less of the equability
which never offends, less attention to the unity and thread of his
little pieces. I should hesitate to give him, on the whole, the
preference as a poet, taking collectively the attributes of that
character; for we must not, in such a comparison, overlook a good deal
of very inferior merit which may be found in the short volume of
Carew’s poems. The best has great beauty, but he has had, in late
criticism, his full share of applause. Two of his most pleasing little
poems appear also among those of Herrick; and as Carew’s were, I
believe, published posthumously, I am rather inclined to prefer the
claim of the other poet, independently of some internal evidence as to
one of them. In all ages, these very short compositions circulate, for
a time, in polished society, while mistakes as to the real author are
natural.[500]
[500] One of these poems begins, “Amongst the myrtles as I
walked, Love and my sighs thus intertalked.” Herrick wants four
good lines which are in Carew; and as they are rather more likely
to have been interpolated than left out, this leads to a sort of
inference that he was the original; there are also some other
petty improvements. The second poem is that beginning, “Ask me
why I send you here, This firstling of the infant year.” Herrick
gives the second line strangely, “This sweet infanta of the
year,” which is little else than nonsense; and all the other
variances are for the worse. I must leave it in doubt, whether he
borrowed, and disfigured a little, or was himself improved upon.
I must own that he has a trick of spoiling what he takes.
Suckling has an incomparable image, on a lady dancing.
Her feet beneath the petticoat,
_Like little mice_, stole in and out,
As if they feared the light--.
Herrick has it thus:--
Her pretty feet, _like snails_, did creep
A little out.
A most singular parallel for an elegant dancer.
|Ben Jonson.|
53. The minor poetry of Ben Jonson is extremely beautiful. This is
partly mixed with his masques and interludes, poetical and musical
rather than dramatic pieces, and intended to gratify the imagination
by the charms of song, as well as by the varied scenes that were
brought before the eye; partly in very short effusions of a single
sentiment, among which two epitaphs are known by heart. Jonson
possessed an admirable taste and feeling in poetry, which his dramas,
except the Sad Shepherd, do not entirely lead us to value highly
enough; and when we consider how many other intellectual excellencies
distinguished him, wit, observation, judgment, memory, learning, we
must acknowledge that the inscription on his tomb, O rare Ben Jonson!
is not more pithy than it is true.
|Wither.|
54. George Wither, by siding with the less poetical, though more
prosperous party in the civil war, and by a profusion of temporary
writings to serve the ends of faction and folly, has left a name which
we were accustomed to despise, till Ellis did justice to “that playful
fancy, pure taste, and artless delicacy of sentiment which distinguish
the poetry of his early youth.” His best poems were published in 1622
with the title “Mistress of Philarete.” Some of them are highly
beautiful, and bespeak a mind above the grovelling puritanism into
which he afterwards fell. I think there is hardly anything in our
lyric poetry of this period equal to Wither’s lines on his Muse,
published by Ellis.[501]
[501] Ellis’s Specimens of Early English Poets, iii. 96.
|Habington.|
|Earl of Pembroke.|
55. The poetry of Habington is that of a pure and amiable mind, turned
to versification by the custom of the age, during a real passion for a
lady of birth and virtue, the Castara whom he afterwards married; but
it displays no great original power, nor is it by any means exempt
from the ordinary blemishes of hyperbolical compliment and far-fetched
imagery. The poems of William Earl of Pembroke, long known by the
character drawn for him by Clarendon, and now as the object of
Shakspeare’s doting friendship, were ushered into the world after his
death, with a letter of extravagant flattery addressed by Donne to
Christiana Countess of Devonshire.[502] But there is little reliance
to be placed on the freedom from interpolation of these posthumous
editions. Among these poems attributed to Lord Pembroke, we find one
of the best known of Carew’s,[503] and even the famous lines addressed
to the Soul, which some have given to Silvester. The poems, in
general, are of little merit; some are grossly indecent; nor would
they be mentioned here except for the interest recently attached to
the author’s name. But they throw no light whatever on the sonnets of
Shakspeare.
[502] The only edition that I have seen, or that I find
mentioned, of Lord Pembroke’s poems is in 1660. But as Donne died
in 1631, I conceive that there must be one of earlier date. The
Countess of Devonshire is not called dowager; her husband died in
1643.
[503]
Ask me no more whither do stray
The golden atoms of the day.
|Suckling.|
|Lovelace.|
56. Sir John Suckling is acknowledged to have left far behind him all
former writers of song in gaiety and ease; it is not equally clear
that he has ever since been surpassed. His poetry aims at no higher
praise; he shows no sentiment or imagination, either because he had
them not, or because he did not require either in the style he chose.
Perhaps the Italians may have poetry in that style equal to
Suckling’s; I do not know that they have, nor do I believe that there
is any in French; that there is none in Latin I know.[504] Lovelace is
chiefly known by a single song; his other poetry is much inferior; and
indeed it may be generally remarked that the flowers of our early
verse, both in the Elizabethan and the subsequent age, have been well
culled by good taste and a friendly spirit of selection. We must not
judge of them, or shall judge of them very favourably, by the extracts
of Headley or Ellis.
[504] Suckling’s Epithalamium, though not written for those “Qui
Musas colitis severiores,” has been read by almost all the world,
and is a matchless piece of liveliness and facility.
|Herrick.|
57. The most amorous, and among the best of our amorous poets was
Robert Herrick, a clergyman ejected from his living in Devonshire by
the long parliament, whose “Hesperides, or Poems Human and Divine,”
were published in 1648. Herrick’s divine poems are of course such as
might be presumed by their title and by his calling; of his human,
which are poetically much superior, and probably written in early
life, the greater portion is light and voluptuous, while some border
on the licentious and indecent. A selection was published in 1815, by
which, as commonly happens, the poetical fame of Herrick does not
suffer; a number of dull epigrams are omitted, and the editor has a
manifest preference for what must be owned to be the most elegant and
attractive part of his author’s rhymes. He has much of the lively
grace that distinguishes Anacreon and Catullus, and approaches also,
with a less cloying monotony, to the Basia of Joannes Secundus.
Herrick has as much variety as the poetry of kisses can well have; but
his love is in a very slight degree that of sentiment, or even any
intense passion; his mistresses have little to recommend them, even in
his own eyes, save their beauties, and none of these are omitted in
his catalogues. Yet he is abundant in the resources of verse; without
the exuberant gaiety of Suckling, or perhaps the delicacy of Carew, he
is sportive, fanciful, and generally of polished language. The faults
of his age are sometimes apparent; though he is not often obscure, he
runs, more perhaps for the sake of variety than any other cause, into
occasional pedantry; he has his conceits and false thoughts, but these
are more than redeemed by the numerous very little poems (for those of
Herrick are frequently not longer than epigrams) which may be praised
without much more qualification than belongs to such poetry.
|Milton.|
58. John Milton was born in 1609. Few are ignorant of his life, in
recovering and recording every circumstance of which no diligence has
been spared, nor has it often been unsuccessful. Of his Latin poetry
some was written at the age of seventeen; in English we have nothing,
I believe, the date of which is known to be earlier than the sonnet on
entering his twenty-third year. In 1634, he wrote Comus, which was
published in 1637. Lycidas was written in the latter year, and most of
his shorter pieces soon afterwards, except the sonnets, some of which
do not come within the first half of the century.
|His Comus.|
59. Comus was sufficient to convince any one of taste and feeling that
a great poet had arisen in England, and one partly formed in a
different school from his contemporaries. Many of them had produced
highly beautiful and imaginative passages; but none had evinced so
classical a judgment, none had aspired to so regular a perfection
Jonson had learned much from the ancients; but there was a grace in
their best models which he did not quite attain. Neither his Sad
Shepherd nor the Faithful Shepherdess of Fletcher have the elegance or
dignity of Comus. A noble virgin and her young brothers, by whom this
masque was originally represented, required an elevation, a
purity, a sort of severity of sentiment which no one in that age could
have given but Milton. He avoided, and nothing loth, the more festive
notes which dramatic poetry was wont to mingle with its serious
strain. But for this he compensated by the brightest hues of fancy and
the sweetest melody of song. In Comus we find nothing prosaic or
feeble, no false taste in the incidents and not much in the language,
nothing over which we should desire to pass on a second perusal. The
want of what we may call personality, none of the characters having
names, except Comus himself, who is a very indefinite being, and the
absence of all positive attributes of time and place, enhance the
ideality of the fiction by a certain indistinctness not unpleasing to
the imagination.
|Lycidas.|
60. It has been said, I think very fairly, that Lycidas is a good test
of a real feeling for what is peculiarly called poetry. Many, or
perhaps we might say most readers do not taste its excellence; nor
does it follow that they may not greatly admire Pope and Dryden, or
even Virgil and Homer. It is, however, somewhat remarkable that
Johnson, who has committed his critical reputation by the most
contemptuous depreciation of this poem, had in an earlier part of his
life selected the tenth eclogue of Virgil for peculiar praise;[505]
the tenth eclogue, which, beautiful as it is, belongs to the same
class of pastoral and personal allegory, and requires the same
sacrifice of reasoning criticism as the Lycidas itself. In the age of
Milton, the poetical world had been accustomed by the Italian and
Spanish writers to a more abundant use of allegory than has been
pleasing to their posterity; but Lycidas is not so much in the nature
of an allegory as of a masque; the characters passed before our eyes
in imagination, as on the stage; they are chiefly mythological, but
not creations of the poet. Our sympathy with the fate of Lycidas may
not be much stronger than for the desertion of Gallus by his mistress;
but many poems will yield an exquisite pleasure to the imagination
that produce no emotion in the heart; nor none at least, except
through associations independent of the subject.
[505] Adventurer, No. 92.
61. The introduction of St. Peter after the fabulous deities of the
sea has appeared an incongruity deserving of censure to some admirers
of this poem. It would be very reluctantly that we could abandon to
this criticism the most splendid passage it presents. But the censure
rests, as I think, on too narrow a principle. In narrative or dramatic
poetry, where something like illusion or momentary belief is to be
produced, the mind requires an objective possibility, a capacity of
real existence, not only in all the separate portions of the imagined
story, but in their coherency and relation to a common whole. Whatever
is obviously incongruous, whatever shocks our previous knowledge of
possibility, destroys to a certain extent that acquiescence in the
fiction, which it is the true business of the fiction to produce. But
the case is not the same in such poems as Lycidas. They pretend to no
credibility, they aim at no illusion; they are read with the willing
abandonment of the imagination to a waking dream, and require only
that general possibility, that combination of images which common
experience does not reject as incompatible, without which the fancy of
the poet would be only like that of the lunatic. And it had been so
usual to blend sacred with mythological personages in allegory, that
no one probably in Milton’s age would have been struck by the
objection.
|Allegro and Penseroso.|
62. The Allegro and Penseroso are perhaps more familiar to us than any
part of the writings of Milton. They satisfy the critics and they
delight mankind. The choice of images is so judicious, their
succession so rapid, the allusions are so various and pleasing, the
leading distinction of the poems is so felicitously maintained, the
versification is so animated, that we may place them at the head of
that long series of descriptive poems which our language has to boast.
It may be added, as in the greater part of Milton’s writings, that
they are sustained at an uniform pitch, with few blemishes of
expression and scarce any feebleness; a striking contrast, in this
respect, to all the contemporaneous poetry, except perhaps that of
Waller. Johnson has thought, that while there is no mirth in his
melancholy, he can detect some melancholy in his mirth. This seems to
be too strongly put; but it may be said that his Allegro is rather
cheerful than gay, and that even his cheerfulness is not always
without effort. In these poems he is indebted to Fletcher, to Burton,
to Browne, to Withers, and probably to more of our early versifiers;
for he was a great collector of sweets from those wild flowers.
|Ode on the Nativity.|
63. The Ode on the Nativity, far less popular than most of the poetry
of Milton, is perhaps the finest in the English language. A
grandeur, a simplicity, a breadth of manner, an imagination at once
elevated and restrained by the subject, reign throughout it. If Pindar
is a model of lyric poetry, it would be hard to name any other ode so
truly Pindaric; but more has naturally been derived from the
Scriptures. Of the other short poems, that on the death of the
Marchioness of Winchester deserves particular mention. It is pity that
the first lines are bad, and the last much worse; for rarely can we
find more feeling or beauty than in some other passages.
|His sonnets.|
64. The sonnets of Milton have obtained of late years the admiration
of all real lovers of poetry. Johnson has been as impotent to fix the
public taste in this instance as in his other criticisms on the
smaller poems of the author of Paradise Lost. These sonnets are indeed
unequal; the expression is sometimes harsh and sometimes obscure;
sometimes too much of pedantic allusion interferes with the sentiment,
nor am I reconciled to his frequent deviations from the best Italian
structure. But such blemishes are lost in the majestic simplicity, the
holy calm, that ennoble many of these short compositions.
|Anonymous poetry.|
65. Many anonymous songs, many popular lays, both of Scottish and
English minstrelsy, were poured forth in this period of the
seventeenth century. Those of Scotland became, after the union of the
crowns, and the consequent cessation of rude border frays, less
warlike than before; they are still, however, imaginative, pathetic,
and natural. It is probable that the best are a little older; but
their date is seldom determinable with much precision. The same may be
said of the English ballads; ballads, which, so far as of a merely
popular nature, appear, by their style and other circumstances, to
belong more frequently to the reign of James I. than any other period.
SECT. VI.
ON LATIN POETRY.
_Latin Poets of France--And other Countries--Of England--May--Milton._
|Latin poets of France.|
66. France, in the latter part of the sixteenth century, had been
remarkably fruitful of Latin poetry; it was the pride of her scholars,
and sometimes of her statesmen. In the age that we have now in review,
we do not find so many conspicuous names; but the custom of academical
institutions, and especially of the seminaries conducted by the
Jesuits, kept up a facility of Latin versification, which it was by no
means held pedantic or ridiculous to exhibit in riper years. The
French enumerate several with praise, Guijon, Bourbon (Borbonius),
whom some have compared with the best of the preceding century, and
among whose poems that on the death of Henry IV. is reckoned the best,
Cerisantes, equal, as some of his admirers think, to Sarbievius, and
superior, as others presume, to Horace, and Petavius, who, having
solaced his leisure hours with Greek and Hebrew, as well as Latin
versification, has obtained in the last the general suffrage of
critics.[506] I can speak of none of these from direct knowledge,
except of Borbonius, whose Diræ on the death of Henry have not
appeared, to my judgment, deserving of so much eulogy.
[506] Baillet, Jugemens des Sçavans, has criticised all these and
several more. Rapin’s opinion on Latin poetry is entitled to much
regard from his own excellence in it. He praises three lyrists,
Casimir, Magdelenet and Cerisantes; the two latter being French.
Sarbieuski a de l’élévation mais sans pureté; Magdelenet est pur
mais sans élévation. Cerisantes a joint dans ses odes l’un et
l’autre; car il écrit noblement, et d’un style assez pur. Après
tout, il n’a pas tant de feu, que Casimir, lequel avoit bien de
l’esprit, et de cet esprit heureux qui fait les poètes. Bucanan a
des odes dignes de l’antiquité, mais il a de grandes inégalités
par le mélange de son caractère qui n’est pas assez uni.
Réflexions sur la Poétique, p. 208.
|In Germany and Italy.|
67. The Germans wrote much in Latin, especially in the earlier decads
of this period. Melissus Schedius, not undistinguished in his native
tongue, might have been mentioned as a Latin poet in the last volume,
since most of his compositions were published in the sixteenth
century. In Italy we have not many conspicuous names. The bad taste
that infested the school of Marini, spread also, according to
Tiraboschi, over Latin poetry. Martial, Lucan, and Claudian, became in
their eyes better models than Catullus and Virgil. Baillet, or rather
those whom he copies, and among whom Rossi, author of the Pinacotheca
Virorum illustrium, under the name of Erythræus, a profuse and
indiscriminating panegyrist, for the most part, of his contemporaries,
furnishes the chief materials, bestows praise on Cesarini, and
Querenghi, whom even Tiraboschi selects from the crowd, and Maffei
Barberini, best known as pope Urban VIII.
|In Holland. Heinsius.|
68. Holland stood at the head of Europe in this line of poetry.
Grotius has had the reputation of writing with spirit, elegance, and
imagination. But he is excelled by Heinsius, whose elegies, still more
than his hexametres, may be ranked high in modern Latin. The habit,
however, of classical imitation, has so much weakened all individual
originality in these versifiers, that it is often difficult to
distinguish them, or to pronounce of any twenty lines that they might
not have been written by some other author. Compare, for example, the
elegies of Buchanan with those of Heinsius, wherever there are no
proper names to guide us; a more finished and continued elegance
belongs, on the whole (as at least I should say), to the latter, but
in a short passage this may not be perceptible, and, I believe, few
would guess with much confidence between the two. Heinsius, however,
like most of the Dutch, is remarkably fond of a polysyllabic close in
the pentameter; at least in his Juvenilia, which, notwithstanding
their title, are perhaps better than his later productions. As it is
not necessary to make a distinct head for the Latin drama, we may here
advert to a tragedy by Heinsius, Herodes Infanticida. This has been
the subject of a critique by Balzac, for the most part very
favourable; and it certainly contains some highly beautiful passages.
Perhaps the description of the Virgin’s feelings on the nativity,
though praised by Balzac, and exquisitely classical in diction, is not
quite in the best taste.[507]
[507]
Oculosque nunc huc pavida nunc illuc jacit,
Interque matrem virginemque hærent adhuc,
Suspensa matris gaudia, ac trepidus pudor.
. . . sæpe, cum blandus puer
Aut a sopore languidas jactat manus,
Tenerisque labris pectus intactum petit,
Virginea subitus ora perfundit rubor,
Laudemque matris virginis crimen putat.
A critique on the poems of Heinsius will be found in the
Retrospective Review, vol. i., p. 49; but notwithstanding the
laudatory spirit, which is, for the most part, too
indiscriminating in that publication, the reviewer has not done
justice to Heinsius, and hardly seems, perhaps a very competent
judge of Latin verse. The suffrages of those who were so, in
favour of this Batavian poet, are collected by Baillet, n. 1482.
|Casimir Sarbievius.|
69. Sidonius Hoschius, a Flemish Jesuit, is extolled by Baillet and
his authorities. But another of the same order, Casimir Sarbievius, a
Pole, is far better known, and, in lyric poetry, which he almost
exclusively cultivated, obtained a much higher reputation. He had
lived some years at Rome, and is full of Roman allusion. He had read
Horace, as Sannazarius had Virgil, and Heinsius Ovid, till the style
and tone became spontaneous, but he has more of centonism than the
other two. Yet, while he constantly reminds us of Horace, it is with
as constant an inferiority; we feel that his Rome was not the same
Rome, that Urban VIII. was not Augustus, nor the Polish victories on
the Danube like those of the sons of Livia. Hence, his flattery of the
great, though not a step beyond that of his master, seems rather more
displeasing, because we have it only on his word that they were truly
great. Sarbievius seldom rises high or pours out an original feeling;
but he is free from conceits, never becomes prosaic, and knows how to
put in good language the common-places with which his subject happens
to furnish him. He is, to a certain degree, in Latin poetry, what
Chiabrera is in Italian, but does not deserve so high a place.
Sarbievius was perhaps the first who succeeded much in the Alcaic
stanza, which the earlier poets seem to avoid, or to use unskilfully.
But he has many unwarrantable licences in his metre, and even false
quantities, as is common to the great majority of these Latin
versifiers.
|Barlæus.|
70. Gaspar Barlæus had as high a name, perhaps, as any Latin poet of
this age. His rhythm is indeed excellent, but if he ever rises to
other excellence, I have not lighted on the passages. A greater
equality I have never found than in Barlæus; nothing is bad, nothing
is striking. It was the practice with Dutchmen on their marriage to
purchase epithalamiums in hexameter verse; and the muse of Barlæus was
in request. These nuptial songs are, of course, about Peleus and
Thetis, or similar personages, interspersed with fitting praises of
the bride and bridegroom. Such poetry is not likely to rise high. The
epicedia, or funeral lamentations, paid for by the heir, are little,
if at all, better than the epithalamia; and the panegyrical effusions
on public or private events rather worse. The elegies of Barlæus, as
we generally find, are superior to the hexameters; he has here the
same smoothness of versification, and a graceful gaiety which gives us
pleasure. In some of his elegies and epistles he counterfeits the
Ovidian style extremely well, so that they might pass for those of his
model. Still, there is an equability, a recurrence of trivial thoughts
and forms, which, in truth, is too much characteristic of modern Latin
to be a reproach to Barlæus. He uses the polysyllabic termination less
than earlier Dutch poets. One of the epithalamia of Barlæus, it may be
observed before we leave him, is entitled Paradisus, and recounts the
nuptials of Adam and Eve. It is possible that Milton may have seen
this; the fourth book of the Paradise Lost compresses the excessive
diffuseness of Barlæus, but the ideas are in great measure the same.
Yet, since this must naturally be the case, we cannot presume
imitation. That Milton availed himself of all the poetry he had read,
we cannot doubt; if Lauder had possessed as much learning as
malignity, he might have made out his case (such as it would have
been), without having recourse to his own stupid forgeries. Few of the
poems of Barlæus are so redundant as this; he has the gift of
stringing together mythological parallels and descriptive poetry
without stint, and his discretion does not inform him where to stop.
|Balde.--Greek poems of Heinsius.|
71. The eight books of Sylvæ by Balde, a German ecclesiastic, are
extolled by Baillet and Bouterwek far above their value; the odes are
tumid and unclassical; yet some have called him equal to Horace.
Heinsius tried his skill in Greek verse. His Peplus Græcorum
Epigrammatum was published in 1613. These are what our schoolboys
would call very indifferent in point of elegance, and, as I should
conceive, of accuracy: articles and expletives (as they used to be
happily called), are perpetually employed for the sake of the metre,
not of the sense.
|Latin poets of Scotland. Jonston’s Psalms.|
72. Scotland might perhaps compete with Holland in this as well as in
the preceding age. In the Delitiæ Poetarum Scotorum, published in 1637
by Arthur Jonston, we find about an equal produce of each century, the
whole number being thirty-seven. Those of Jonston himself, and some
elegies by Scot of Scotstarvet, are among the best. The Scots
certainly wrote Latin with a good ear and considerable elegance of
phrase. A sort of critical controversy was carried on in the last
century as to the versions of the psalms by Buchanan and Jonston.
Though the national honour may seem equally secure by the superiority
of either, it has, I believe, been usual in Scotland to maintain the
older poet against all the world. I am nevertheless inclined to think
that Jonston’s psalms, all of which are in elegiac metre, do not fall
short of those of Buchanan, either in elegance of style or in
correctness of Latinity. In the 137th, with which Buchanan has taken
much pains, he may be allowed the preference, but not at a great
interval, and he has attained this superiority by too much
diffuseness.
|Owen’s Epigrams.|
|Alabaster’s Roxana.|
73. Nothing good, and hardly tolerable, in a poetical sense, had
appeared in Latin verse among ourselves till this period. Owen’s
epigrams (Audoeni Epigrammata), a well-known collection, were
published in 1607; unequal enough, they are sometimes neat and more
often witty: but they scarcely aspire to the name of poetry.
Alabaster, a man of recondite Hebrew learning, published in 1632 his
tragedy of Roxana, which, as he tells us, was written about forty
years before for one night’s representation, probably at college, but
had been lately printed by some plagiary as his own. He forgets,
however, to inform the reader, and thus lays himself open to some
recrimination, that his tragedy is very largely borrowed from the
Dalida of Groto, an Italian dramatist of the sixteenth century.[508]
The story, the characters, the incidents, almost every successive
scene, many thoughts, descriptions and images, are taken from this
original; but it is a very free translation, or rather differs from
what can be called a translation. The tragedy of Groto is shortened,
and Alabaster has thrown much into another form, besides introducing
much of his own. The plot is full of all the accumulated horror and
slaughter in which the Italians delighted on their stage. I rather
prefer the original tragedy. Alabaster has spirit and fire with some
degree of skill; but his notion of tragic style is of the “King
Cambyses’ vein;” he is inflated and hyperbolical to excess, which is
not the case with Groto.
[508] I am indebted for the knowledge of this to a manuscript
note I found in the copy of Alabaster’s Roxana in the British
Museum: Haud multum abest hæc tragedia a pura versione tragediæ
Italicæ Ludovici Groti Cæci Hadriensis cui titulus Dalida. This
induced me to read the tragedy of Groto, which I had not
previously done.
The title of Roxana runs thus: Roxana tragedia a plagiarii
unguibus vindicata aucta et agnita ab autore Gul. Alabastro.,
Lond., 1632.
|May’s Supplement to Lucan.|
74. But the first Latin poetry which England can vaunt is May’s
Supplement to Lucan, in seven books, which carry down the history of
the Pharsalia to the death of Cæsar. This is not only a very spirited
poem, but, in many places at least, an excellent imitation. The
versification, though it frequently reminds us of his model, is
somewhat more negligent. May seems rarely to fall into Lucan’s
tumid extravagances, or to emulate his philosophical grandeur; but the
narration is almost as impetuous and rapid, the images as thronged;
and sometimes we have rather a happy imitation of the ingenious
sophisms Lucan is apt to employ. The death of Cato and that of Cæsar,
are among the passages well worthy of praise. In some lines on
Cleopatra’s intrigue with Cæsar, being married to her brother, he has
seized, with felicitous effect, not only the broken cadences, but the
love of moral paradox we find in Lucan.[509]
[509]
---- Nec crimen inesse
Concubitu nimium tali, Cleopatra, putabunt
Qui Ptolemæorum thalamos, consuetaque jura
Incestæ novere domûs, fratremque sorori
Conjugio junctam, sacræ sub nomine tædæ
Majus adulterio delictum; turpius îsset,
Quis credat? justi ad thalamos Cleopatra mariti,
Utque minus lecto peccaret, adultera facta est.
|Milton’s Latin poems.|
75. Many of the Latin poems of Milton were written in early life, some
even at the age of seventeen. His name, and the just curiosity of
mankind to trace the development of a mighty genius, would naturally
attract our regard. They are in themselves full of classical elegance,
of thoughts natural and pleasing, of a diction culled with taste from
the gardens of ancient poetry, of a versification remarkably
well-cadenced and grateful to the ear. There is in them, without a
marked originality, which Latin verse can rarely admit but at the
price of some incorrectness or impropriety, a more individual display
of the poet’s mind than we usually find. “In the elegies,” it is said
by Warton, a very competent judge of Latin poetry, “Ovid was
professedly Milton’s model for language and versification. They are
not, however, a perpetual and uniform tissue of Ovidian phraseology.
With Ovid in view he has an original manner and character of his own,
which exhibit a remarkable perspicuity of contexture, a native
facility and fluency. Nor does his observation of Roman models oppress
or destroy our great poet’s inherent powers of invention and
sentiment. I value these pieces as much for their fancy and genius as
for their style and expression. That Ovid, among the Latin poets, was
Milton’s favourite, appears not only from his elegiac but his
hexametric poetry. The versification of our author’s hexameters has
yet a different structure from that of the metamorphoses: Milton’s is
more clear, intelligible, and flowing; less desultory, less familiar,
and less embarrassed, with a frequent recurrence of periods. Ovid is
at once rapid and abrupt.”[510] Why Warton should have at once
supposed Ovid to be Milton’s favourite model in hexameters, and yet so
totally different as he represents him to be, seems hard to say. The
structure of our poet’s hexameters is much more Virgilian, nor do I
see the least resemblance in them to the manner of Ovid. These Latin
poems of Milton bear some traces of juvenility, but, for the most
part, such as please us for that very reason; it is the spring time of
an ardent and brilliant fancy, before the stern and sour spirit of
polemical puritanism had gained entrance into his mind, the voice of
the Allegro and of Comus.
[510] Warton’s essay on the Latin poetry of Milton, inserted at
length in Todd’s edition.
CHAPTER XXIII.
HISTORY OF DRAMATIC LITERATURE FROM 1600 TO 1650.
SECT. I.
ON THE ITALIAN AND SPANISH DRAMA.
_Character of the Italian Theatre in this Age--Bonarelli--The
Spanish Theatre--Calderon--Appreciation of his merits as a Dramatic
Poet._
|Decline of the Italian Theatre.|
1. The Italian theatre, if we should believe one of its historians,
fell into total decay during the whole course of the seventeenth
century, though the number of dramatic pieces of various kinds was by
no means small. He makes a sort of apology for inserting in a copious
list of dramatic performances any that appeared after 1600, and stops
entirely with 1650.[511] But in this he seems hardly to have done
justice to a few, which, if not of remarkable excellence, might be
selected from the rest. Andreini is perhaps best known by name in
England, and that for one only of his eighteen dramas, the Adamo,
which has been supposed, on too precarious grounds, to have furnished
the idea of Paradise Lost in the original form, as it was planned by
its great author. The Adamo was first published in 1613, and
afterwards with amplification in 1641. It is denominated “A Sacred
Representation;” and, as Andreini was a player by profession, must be
presumed to have been brought upon the stage. It is, however, asserted
by Riccoboni, that those who wrote regular tragedies did not cause
them to be represented; probably he might have scrupled to give that
epithet to the Adamo. Hayley and Walker have reckoned it a composition
of considerable beauty.
[511] Riccoboni, Hist. du Théâtre Italien, vol. i.
2. The majority of Italian tragedies in the seventeenth century were
taken, like the Adamo, from sacred subjects, including such as
ecclesiastical legends abundantly supplied. Few of these gave
sufficient scope, either by action or character, for the diversity of
excitement which the stage demands. Tragedies more truly deserving
that name were the Solimano of Bonarelli, the Tancredi of Campeggio,
the Demetrius of Rocco, which Salfi prefers to the rest, and the
Aristodemo of Carlo de Dottori. A drama by Testi, L’Isola di Alcina,
had some reputation; but in this, which the title betrays not to be a
legitimate tragedy, he introduced musical airs, and thus trod on the
boundaries of a rival art.[512] It has been suggested, with no
inconsiderable probability, that in her passion for the melodrame
Italy lost all relish for the graver tone of tragedy. Music, at least
the music of the opera, conspired with many more important
circumstances to spread an effeminacy over the public character.
[512] Salfi, Continuation de Ginguéné, vol. xii., chap. 9.
Besides this larger work, Salfi published, in 1829, a short essay
on the Italian stage, Saggio Storico-Critico della Commedia
Italiana.
|Filli di Sciro.|
3. The pastoral drama had always been allied to musical sentiment,
even though it might be without accompaniment. The feeling it inspired
was nearly that of the opera. In this style we find one imitation of
Tasso and Guarini, inferior in most qualities, yet deserving some
regard, and once popular even with the critics of Italy. This was the
Filli di Sciro of Bonarelli, published at Ferrara, a city already
fallen into the hands of priests, but round whose deserted palaces the
traditions of poetical glory still lingered, in 1607, and represented
by an academy in the same place soon afterwards. It passed through
numerous editions, and was admired, even beyond the Alps, during the
whole century, and perhaps still longer. It displays much of the bad
taste and affectation of that period. Bonarelli is as strained in the
construction of his story and in his characters, as he is in his
style. Celia, the heroine of this pastoral, struggles with a double
love, the original idea, as he might truly think, of his drama, which
he wrote a long dissertation in order to justify. It is, however, far
less conformable to the truth of nature than to the sophisticated
society for which he wrote. A wanton capricious court lady might
perhaps waver, with some warmth of inclination towards both, between
two lovers, “Alme dell’alma mia,” as Celia calls them, and be very
willing to possess either. But what is morbid in moral affection
seldom creates sympathy, or is fit either for narrative poetry or the
stage. Bonarelli’s diction is studied and polished to the highest
degree; and though its false refinement and affected graces often
displease us, the real elegance of insulated passages makes us pause
to admire. In harmony and sweetness of sound he seems fully equal to
his predecessors, Tasso and Guarini; but he has neither the pathos of
the one, nor the fertility of the other. The language and turn of
thought seems, more than in the Pastor Fido to be that of the opera,
wanting indeed nothing but the intermixture of air to be perfectly
adapted to music. Its great reputation, which even Crescimbeni does
his utmost to keep up, proves the decline of good taste in Italy, and
the lateness of its revival.[513]
[513] Istoria della volgar Poesia, iv. 147. He places the Filli
di Sciro next to the Aminta.
|Translations of Spanish dramas.|
4. A new fashion which sprang up about 1620, both marks the extinction
of taste for genuine tragedy, and by furnishing a substitute, stood in
the way of its revival. Translations from Spanish tragedies and
tragi-comedies, those of Lope de Vega and his successors, replaced the
native muse of Italy. These were in prose and in three acts, irregular
of course, and with very different characteristics from those of the
Italian school. “The very name of tragedy,” says Riccoboni, “became
unknown in our country; the _monsters_ which usurped the place
did not pretend to that glorious title. Tragi-comedies rendered from
the Spanish, such as Life is a Dream (of Calderon), the Samson, the
Guest of Stone, and others of the same class, were the popular
ornaments of the Italian stage.”[514]
[514] Hist. du Théâtre Italien, i. 47. The extemporaneous comedy
was called commedia dell’arte. “It consisted,” says Salfi, “in a
mere sketch or plan of a dramatic composition, the parts in which
having been hardly shadowed out were assigned to different actors
who were to develop them in extemporaneous dialogue. Such a
sketch was called a scenario, containing the subject of each
scene, and those of Flaminio Scala were celebrated. Saggio
Storico-Critico, p. 38. The pantomime, as it exists among us, is
the descendant of this extemporaneous comedy, but with little of
the wit and spirit of its progenitor.
|Extemporaneous comedy.|
5. The extemporaneous comedy had always been the amusement of the
Italian populace, not to say of all who wished to unbend their minds.
An epoch in this art was made in 1611 by Flaminio Scala, who first
published the outline or canvas of a series of these pieces, the
dialogue being of course reserved for the ingenious performers.[515]
This outline was not quite so short as that sometimes given in Italian
play bills; it explained the drift of each actor’s part in the scene,
but without any distinct hint of what he was to say. The construction
of these fables is censured by Riccoboni as both weak and licentious;
but it would not be reasonable to expect that it should be otherwise.
The talent of the actors supplied the deficiency of writers. A certain
quickness of wit, and tact in catching the shades of manner,
comparatively rare among us, are widely diffused in Italy. It would
be, we may well suspect, impossible to establish an extemporaneous
theatre in England which should not be stupidly vulgar.[516] But
Bergamo sent out many Harlequins, and Venice many Pantaloons. They
were respected, as brilliant wit ought to be. The emperor Mathias
ennobled Cecchini, a famous Harlequin, who was, however, a man of
letters. These actors sometimes took the plot of old comedies as their
outline, and disfigured them, so as hardly to be known, by their
extemporaneous dialogue.[517]
[515] Salfi, p. 40.
[516] This is only meant as to dialogue and as to the public
stage. The talent of a single actor, like the late Charles
Mathews, is not an exception; but even the power of strictly
extemporaneous comedy, with the agreeable poignancy that the
minor theatre requires, is not wanting among some whose station
and habits of life restrain its exercise to the most private
circles.
[517] Riccoboni, Hist. du Théâtre Italien. Salfi, xii., 518. An
elaborate disquisition on the extemporaneous comedy by Mr.
Panizzi, in the Foreign Review for 1829 (not the Foreign
Quarterly, but one early extinguished), derives it from the mimes
and Atellanian comedies of ancient Italy, tracing them through
the middle ages. The point seems sufficiently proved. The last
company of performers in this old, though plebeian, family
existed within about thirty years in Lombardy; a friend of mine
at that time witnessed the last of the Harlequins. I need hardly
say that this character was not a mere skipper over the stage, as
we have seen him, but a very honest and lively young Bergamasque.
The plays of Gasparo Gozzi, if plays they are, are mere hints to
guide the wit of extemporaneous actors.
|Spanish stage.|
|Calderon. Number of his pieces.|
6. Lope de Vega was at the height of his glory at the beginning of
this century. Perhaps the majority of his dramas fall within it; but
enough has been said on the subject in the last volume. His
contemporaries and immediate successors were exceedingly numerous; the
effulgence of dramatic literature in Spain corresponding exactly in
time to that of England. Several are named by Bouterwek and Velasquez;
but one only, Pedro Calderon de la Barca, must be permitted to arrest
us. This celebrated man was born in 1600 and died 1683. From an early
age till after the middle of the century when he entered the church,
he contributed, with a fertility only eclipsed by that of Lope, a long
list of tragic, historic, comic, and tragi-comic dramas to the Spanish
stage. In the latter period of his life, he confined himself to the
religious pieces, called Autos Sacramentales. Of these, 97 are
published in the collective edition of 1726, besides 127 of his
regular plays. In one year, 1635, it is said that twelve of his
comedies appeared. But the authenticity of so large a number has been
questioned; he is said to have given a list of his sacred plays, at
the age of eighty, consisting of only 68. No collection was published
by himself. Some of his comedies, in the Spanish sense, it may be
observed, turn more or less on religious subjects, as their titles
show: El Purgatorio de San Patricio--La Devocion de la Cruz--Judas
Maccabeus--La Cisma de Inghilterra. He did not dislike contemporary
subjects. In El Sitio de Breda, we have Spinola, Nassau, and others
then living on the scene. Calderon’s metre is generally trochaic, of
eight or seven syllables, not always rhyming; but verses de arte
mayor, as they are called, or anapæstic lines of eleven or twelve
syllables, and also hendecasyllables frequently occur.
|His comedies.|
7. The comedies, those properly so called, _de capa y espada_,
which represent manners, are full of incident, but not perhaps crowded
so as to produce any confusion; the characters have nothing very
salient, but express the sentiments of gentlemen with frankness and
spirit. We find in every one a picture of Spain: gallantry, jealousy,
quick resentment of insult, sometimes deep revenge. The language of
Calderon is not unfrequently poetical, even in these lighter dramas,
but hyperbolical figures and insipid conceits deform its beauty. The
gracioso, or witty servant, is an unfailing personage; but I do not
know (my reading, however, being extremely limited) that Calderon
displays much brilliancy or liveliness in his sallies.
8. The plays of Calderon required a good deal of theatrical apparatus,
unless the good nature of the audience dispensed with it. But this
kind of comedy must have led to scenical improvements. They seem to
contain no indecency, nor do the intrigues ever become criminal, at
least in effect; most of the ladies indeed are unmarried. Yet they
have been severely censured by later critics on the score of their
morality, which is, no doubt, that of the stage, but considerably
purified in comparison with the Italian and French of the sixteenth
century. Calderon seems to bear no resemblance to any English writer
of his age, except, in a certain degree, to Beaumont and Fletcher. And
as he wants their fertility of wit and humour, we cannot, I presume,
place the best of his comedies on a level with even the second class
of theirs. But I should speak, perhaps, with more reserve of an
author, very few of whose plays I have read, and with whose language I
am very imperfectly acquainted; nor should I have ventured so far, if
the opinion of many European critics had not seemed to warrant my
frigid character of one who has sometimes been so much applauded.
|La Vida es Sueno.|
9. La Vida es Sueno rises, in its subject as well as style, above the
ordinary comedies of Calderon. Basilius, king of Poland, a deep
philosopher, has, by consulting the stars, had the misfortune of
ascertaining that his unborn son, Sigismund, would be under some
extraordinary influences of evil passion. He resolves in consequence
to conceal his birth, and to bring him up in a horrible solitude,
where, it hardly appears why, he is laden with chains, and covered
with skins of beasts, receiving meantime an excellent education, and
becoming able to converse on every subject, though destitute of all
society but that of his keeper Clotaldo. The inheritance of the crown
of Poland is supposed to have devolved on Astolfo, duke of Moscovy, or
on his cousin Estrella, who, as daughter of an elder branch, contests
it with him. The play opens by a scene, in which Rosaura, a Moscovite
lady, who, having been betrayed by Astolfo, has fled to Poland in
man’s attire, descends the almost impassable precipices which overhang
the small castle wherein Sigismund is confined. This scene and that in
which he first appears, are impressive and full of beauty, even now
that we are are become accustomed in excess to these theatrical
wonders. Clotaldo discovers the prince in conversation with a
stranger, who, by the king’s general order must be detained, and
probably for death. A circumstance leads him to believe that this
stranger is his son; but the Castilian loyalty transferred to Poland
forbids him to hesitate in obeying his instructions. The king,
however, who has fortunately determined to release his son, and try an
experiment upon the force of the stars, coming in at this time, sets
Rosaura at liberty.
10. In the next act Sigismund, who, by the help of a sleeping potion,
has been conveyed to the palace, wakes in a bed of down, and in the
midst of royal splendour. He has little difficulty in understanding
his new condition, but preserves a not unnatural resentment of his
former treatment. The malign stars prevail; he treats Astolfo with the
utmost arrogance, reviles and threatens his father, throws one of his
servants out of the window, attempts the life of Clotaldo and the
honour of Rosaura. The king, more convinced than ever of the truth of
astrology, directs another soporific draught to be administered; and
in the next scene we find the prince again in his prison. Clotaldo,
once more at his side, persuades him that his late royalty has passed
in a dream, wisely observing, however, that asleep or awake, we should
always do what is right.
11. Sigismund, after some philosophical reflections, prepares to
submit to the sad reality which has displaced his vision. But in the
third act, an unforeseen event recalls him to the world. The army,
become acquainted with his rights, and indignant that the king should
transfer them to Astolfo, break into his prison, and place him at
their head. Clotaldo expects nothing but death. A new revolution,
however, has taken place. Sigismund, corrected by the dismal
consequences of giving way to passion in his former dream, and
apprehending a similar waking once more, has suddenly overthrown the
sway of the sinister constellations that had enslaved him; he becomes
generous, mild, and master of himself; and the only pretext
for his disinheritance being removed, it is easy that he should be
reconciled to his father, that Astolfo, abandoning a kingdom he can no
longer claim, should espouse the injured Rosaura, and that the
reformed prince should become the husband of Estrella. The incidents
which chiefly relate to these latter characters, have been omitted in
this slight analysis.
12. This tragi-comedy presents a moral not so contemptible in the age
of Calderon, as it may now appear; that the stars may influence our
will, but do not oblige it. If we could extract an allegorical meaning
from the chimeras of astrology, and deem the stars but names for the
circumstances of birth and fortune which affect the character as well
as condition of every man, but yield to the persevering energy of
self-correction, we might see in this fable the shadow of a permanent
and valuable truth. As a play, it deserves considerable praise; the
events are surprising without excessive improbability, and succeed
each other without confusion; the thoughts are natural and poetically
expressed; and it requires, on the whole, less allowance for the
different standard of national taste than is usual in the Spanish
drama.
|A Secreto agravio secreta vengança.|
13. A Secreto agravio secreta vengança is a domestic tragedy which
turns on a common story--a husband’s revenge on one whom he
erroneously believes to be still a favoured, and who had been once an
accepted lover. It is something like Tancred and Sigismunda, except
that the lover is killed instead of the husband. The latter puts him
to death secretly, which gives name to the play. He afterwards sets
fire to his own house, and in the confusion designedly kills his wife.
A friend communicates the facts to his sovereign, Sebastian, king of
Portugal, who applauds what has been done. It is an atrocious play,
and speaks terrible things as to the state of public sentiment in
Spain, but abounds with interesting and touching passages.
|Style of Calderon.|
14. It has been objected to Calderon, and the following defence of
Bouterwek seems very insufficient, that his servants converse in a
poetical style like their masters. “The spirit, on these particular
occasions,” says that judicious but lenient critic, “must not be
misunderstood. The servants in Calderon’s comedies always imitate the
language of their masters. In most cases they express themselves like
the latter, in the natural language of real life, and often divested
of that colouring of the ideas, without which a dramatic work ceases
to be a poem. But whenever romantic gallantry speaks in the language
of tenderness, admiration, or flattery, then, according to Spanish
custom, every idea becomes a metaphor; and Calderon, who was a
thorough Spaniard, seized these opportunities to give the reins to his
fancy, and to suffer it to take a bold lyric flight beyond the
boundaries of nature. On such occasions the most extravagant
metaphoric language, in the style of the Italian Marinists, did not
appear unnatural to a Spanish audience; and even Calderon himself had
for that style a particular fondness, to the gratification of which he
sacrificed a chaster taste. It was his ambition to become a more
refined Lope de Vega, or a Spanish Marini. Thus, in his play, Bien
vengas mal, si vengas solo, a waiting-maid, addressing her young
mistress who has risen in a gay humour, says--“Aurora would not have
done wrong had she slumbered that morning in her snowy crystal, for
that the sight of her mistress’s charms would suffice to draw aside
the curtains from the couch of Sol.” She adds that, using a Spanish
idea, “it might then indeed be said that the sun had risen in her
lady’s eyes.” Valets, on the like occasion, speak in the same style;
and when lovers address compliments to their mistresses, and these
reply in the same strain, the play of far-fetched metaphors is
aggravated by antitheses to a degree which is intolerable to any but a
Spanish-formed taste. But it must not be forgotten that this language
of gallantry was in Calderon’s time spoken by the fashionable world,
and that it was a vernacular property of the ancient national
poetry.”[518] What is this but to confess that Calderon had not genius
to raise himself above his age, and that he can be read only as a
“Triton of the minnows;” one who is great but in comparison with his
neighbours? It will not convert bad writing into good to tell us, as
is perpetually done, that we must place ourselves in the author’s
position, and make allowances for the taste of his age, or the temper
of his nation. All this is true, relatively to the author himself, and
may be pleaded against a condemnation of his talents; but the excuse
of the man is not that of the work.
[518] P. 507. It has been ingeniously hinted in the Quarterly
Review, vol. xxv., that the high-flown language of servants in
Spanish dramas, is a parody on that of their masters, and
designed to make it ridiculous. But this is probably too refined
an excuse.
|His merits sometimes over-rated.|
15. The fame of Calderon has been latterly revived in Europe through
the praise of some German critics, but especially the unbounded
panegyric of one of their greatest men, William Schlegel. The passage
is well known for its brilliant eloquence. Every one must differ with
reluctance and respect from this accomplished writer; and an
Englishman, acknowledging with gratitude and admiration what Schlegel
has done for the glory of Shakspeare, ought not to grudge the laurels
he showers upon another head. It is, however, rather as a poet than a
dramatist that Calderon has received this homage; and in his poetry it
seems to be rather bestowed on the mysticism, which finds a responsive
chord in so many German hearts, than on what we should consider a more
universal excellence, a sympathy with, and a power over all that is
true and beautiful in nature and in man. Sismondi (but the distance
between Weimar and Geneva in matters of taste is incomparably greater
than by the public road), dissenting from this eulogy of Schlegel,
which he fairly lays before the reader, stigmatizes Calderon as
eminently the poet of the age wherein he lived, the age of Philip IV.
Salfi goes so far as to say we can hardly read Calderon without
indignation; since he seems to have had no view but to make his genius
subservient to the lowest prejudices and superstitions of his
country.[519] In the 25th volume of the Quarterly Review an elaborate
and able critique on the plays of Calderon seems to have estimated him
without prejudice on either side. “His boundless and inexhaustible
fertility of invention, his quick power of seizing and prosecuting
everything with dramatic effect, the unfailing animal spirits of his
dramas, if we may venture on the expression, the general loftiness and
purity of his sentiments, the rich facility of his verse, the
abundance of his language, and the clearness and precision with which
he embodies his thoughts in words and figures, entitle him to a high
rank as to the imagination and creative faculty of a poet, but we
cannot consent to enrol him among the mighty masters of the human
breast.”[520] His total want of truth to nature, even the ideal nature
which poetry embodies, justifies, at least, this sentence. “The
wildest flights of Biron and Romeo,” it is observed, “are tame to the
heroes of Calderon; the Asiatic pomp of expression, the exuberance of
metaphor, the perpetual recurrence of the same figures, which the
poetry of Spain derived from its intercourse with the Arabian
conquerors of the peninsula, are lavished by him in all their fulness.
Every address of a lover to a mistress is thickly studded with stars
and flowers; her looks are always nets of gold, her lips rubies, and
her heart a rock, which the rivers of his tears attempt in vain to
melt. In short, the language of the heart is entirely abandoned for
that of the fancy; the brilliant but false concetti which have
infected the poetical literature of every country, and which have been
universally exploded by pure taste, glitter in every page, and intrude
into every speech.”[521]
[519] Hist. Litt. de Ginguéné, vol. xii., p. 499.
[520] P. 24.
[521] P. 14.
SECT. II.
ON THE FRENCH DRAMA.
_Early French Dramatists of this Period--Corneille--His principal
Tragedies--Rotrou._
|Plays of Hardy.|
16. Among the company who performed at the second theatre of Paris,
that established in the Marais, was Hardy, who, like Shakspeare,
uniting both arts, was himself the author of 600, or, as some say, 800
dramatic pieces. It is said that forty-one of these are extant in the
collection of his works which I have never seen. Several of them were
written, learned by heart, and represented within a week. His own
inventions are the worst of all; his tragedies and tragi-comedies are
borrowed with as close an adherence to the original text as possible,
from Homer or Plutarch or Cervantes. They have more incident than
those of his predecessors, and are somewhat less absurd; but Hardy is
a writer of little talent. The Marianne is the most tolerable of his
tragedies. In these he frequently abandoned the chorus, and even where
he introduces it, does not regularly close the act with an ode.”[522]
[522] Fontenelle, Hist. du Théâtre Français (in Œuvres de
Fontenelle, iii., 72). Suard, Mélanges de Littérature, vol. iv.
17. In the comedies of Hardy, and in the many burlesque farces
represented under Henry IV. and Louis XIII., no regard was paid to
decency, either in the language or the circumstances. Few persons of
rank, especially ladies, attended the theatres.[523] These
were first attracted by pastoral representations, of which Racan gave
a successful example in his Artenice. It is hardly, however, to be
called a drama.[524] But the stage, being no longer abandoned to the
populace, and a more critical judgment in French literature gaining
ground, encouraged by Richelieu, who built a large room in his palace
for the representation of Mirame, an indifferent tragedy, part of
which was suspected to be his own,[525] the ancient theatre began to
be studied, rules were laid down and partially observed, a perfect
decorum replaced the licentiousness and gross language of the old
writers. Mairet and Rotrou, though without rising, in their first
plays, much above Hardy, just served to prepare the way for the father
and founder of the national theatre.[526]
[523] Suard, p. 134. Rotrou boasts that since he wrote for the
theatre, it had become so well-regulated that respectable women
might go to it with as little scruple as to the Luxembourg
garden. Corneille, however, has, in general, the credit of having
purified the stage; after his second piece, Clitandre, he
admitted nothing licentious in his comedies. The only remain of
grossness, Fontenelle observes, was that the lovers _se
tutoyoient_; but, as he gravely goes on to remark, le tutoiement
ne choque pas les bonnes mœurs; il ne choque que la politesse et
la vraie galanterie, p. 91. But the last instance of this heinous
offence is in Le Menteur.
[524] Suard, ubi suprà.
[525] Fontenelle, p. 84, 96.
[526] Id. p. 78. It is difficult in France, as it is with us, to
ascertain the date of plays, because they were often represented
for years before they came from the press. It is conjectured by
Fontenelle, that one or two pieces of Mairet and Rotrou may have
preceded any by Corneille.
18. The Melite of Corneille, his first production, was represented in
1629, when he was twenty-three years of age. This is only
distinguished, as some say, from those of Hardy by a greater vigour of
style; but Fontenelle gives a very different opinion. It had, at
least, a success which caused a new troop of actors to be established
in the Marais. His next, Clitandre, it is agreed, is not so good. But
La Veuve is much better; irregular in action, but with spirit,
character, and well-invented situations, it is the first model of the
higher comedy.[527] These early comedies must, in fact, have been
relatively of considerable merit, since they raised Corneille to high
reputation, and connected him with the literary men of his time. The
Medea, though much borrowed from Seneca, gave a tone of grandeur and
dignity unknown before to French tragedy. This appeared in 1635, and
was followed by the Cid next year.
[527] Suard, Fontenelle, La Harpe.
|The Cid.|